China: Panopticon

What's up my people! My two people...

Jokes. This isn't even an unnatural hiatus. Anyway, I'm back from China, and I've written up some 15 pages of notes and read some good books. This and being verbally suppressed and mocked by cultural ignorance and straight up insensitivity, with cup of unsanitary and extreme weather conditions, and a pinch of negative progress, has given my mind so many recipes of words.

So I will be posting day by day, photos on Tumblr, journals and disorganized essays here. Links between the two. I'll try not to dry it up with details and keep it about ideas. This is just a commitment to write, because its summer, and I need practice. Hence and whatever, the first day:

E. Lockhart explains the panopticon: mass behavior and order based on paranoia. The panopticon is the feeling that your mother knows you've been rolling in grass with a boy. It’s the sense that someone saw you swipe your neighbor’s pansies. It’s the reason I never snuck off campus for lunch or called myself out of school. The panopticon is fear, fear that you are always being watched, so that very little actual watching has to be done at all.

On the plane, the panopticon is not the government or the security cameras. The panopticon is the two hundred Chinese people who cannot help but feel you up, head to toe, with their eyes. The privilege of international travel seems to instill a haughtiness found nowhere else. There must not be someone as well-versed in English and Chinese, French and Chinese, or English, French, and Chinese as well as you. And this is a relatively logical thought. Sometimes, affording the round trip just means that you’re better. At least, good enough to dine in the airport and chuck the leftovers.

Aside from the Asians, the plane exerts its own power. Besides controlling your life at inexplicable altitudes and speeds, it forces proximity. You breathe the same air as vomiting children and screaming infants. You deal with the seat in front of you that shakes as the passenger collapses, clearly exhausted from sitting down. You tolerate the drool and knee-touching from your family members. Because the plane is getting you somewhere.

The stewardesses try to give you options – pork with rice or chicken with pasta – mystery meat with white gel material for carbohydrates, or mystery meat with white gel material for carbohydrates? Halfway through the flight, they turn off the lights, and mass hypnosis occurs. Two hundred Chinese people promptly fall asleep and wake only when the smell of ramen – this time, only chicken flavored – awakens their native noses.

There were two saving graces on the 28 hour transit from Chicago to Chongqing. 

The first was the beverage cart, compliments of each airline that looks forward to working with you and your wallet again. This cart is diversity in cans. We choose what we want, when we want. They have it all, and no one could be denied a fresh cup of anything – Diet Coke, hot tea, or beer.

The second grace was Eddie Huang. Planes have a nasty smell, even though I’m sure even strawberry pine-nuts would reek after 13 hours of heavy exposure, mixed with human sweat and unabashed burps. Eddie wrote Fresh Off the Boat to talk about race, but he started, kindly, with sweet descriptions of water dumplings and McRibs. Nothing stopped the squirming in my stomach than imagining the smell of braised pork on long grained rice.

 Notice that neither of these involved watery rice gook, half-assed lettuce leafs, or omelettes that literally squish under your complimentary plastic utensils. I think they've started leaving out toothpicks now, too.